The chainsaw blues

There’s a scene in “Parkland,” the new film about the JFK assassination, where a shaken Abraham Zapruder, played by Paul Giamatti, has this horrific moment of clarity. Not only has he witnessed and inadvertently filmed the breathtaking murder of his hero, he understands his life, and his family’s life, will never be the same.

In the blink of an eye, Zapruder has been blasted from anonymity into the glare of multiple law-enforcement agencies. His phone rings off the hook. The media is playing tug-of-war hardball for exclusive publishing rights. Behind closed door, a Life magazine editor has an inside track on fee negotiations. Anguished, guilt-addled, the Dallas clothing manufacturer rightly insists his first priority is to protect the security of his family, whose privacy will be turned inside out through no fault of his own.

Life would ultimately purchase the images for $150,000; Zapruder would donate $25,000 to the widow of Dallas PD officer J.D. Tippit, slain minutes after Kennedy was gunned down. Zapruder would never use the Bell and Howell Zoomatic camera again. Nor would the reluctant eyewitness to history keep a copy of the footage that everyone wanted. He died in 1970 at 65. Time flies.

“Opinion is that exercise of the human will which helps us to make a decision without information” — educator John Erskine/CREDIT: belch.com

You may have read about the latest Roswell controversy involving two Kodachrome slides rumored to show a dead alien recovered from the alleged 1947 crash site. The reason we’re hearing about it now is that a member of the small informal group of researchers — known as the “Roswell Dream Team,” an extremely unfortunate moniker — shared information with a trigger-happy outside player, and the whole thing blew up on the Internet before their investigation was complete. It’s easy to get lost in the details, but team member Kevin Randle issued a mea culpa summary last week.

De Void, of course, has no skin in the game and has no idea about what’s what. Given the “Alien Autopsy” fiasco of 1995, De Void’s suspicions here are visceral. However. What’s different this time is that, if the tale is true, the owner of the photos isn’t shopping for the highest bidder — he’s apparently scared sh*tless about having his name linked to them. Which, in the context of UFOs, sounds absolutely, perfectly, unambiguously and unremarkably sane.

Tony Bragalia is one of the researchers. He’s a Sarasota hometown guy and we’ve talked on a number of occasions. He’s an executive talent scout and he knows how and where to root out information. He’s been on the Roswell trail for years and financed his research out of his own pocket. He says he’s met the owner of the photos and seen the pix personally. “They’re both in full color and extremely close,” he says.

Story in a nutshell: an estate-cleaning outfit discovers the slides stashed in an envelope inside an attic trunk belonging to a deceased and apparently respected geologist working the Texas-New Mexico region for oil exploration in the 1940s. The geologist and his late wife have no heirs. The slides are brought to the attention of the business owner, who has read Witness to Roswell by Thomas Carey and Donald Schmitt. The guy makes a few calls, out of curiosity. Bragalia gets pulled into the investigation last year.

In many ways, it’s a fool’s errand. Even if, as Bragalia contends, the slides have been authenticated as vintage 1947 stock, the images could’ve been staged. The photographer is unknown. The time and location of the shots are unknown. The geologist is dead. Still, given the potential stakes, research proceeds, delving into the geologist’s friends, professional associates, the paper trail, the gritty thankless stuff that might produce the unanticipated revelation, or maybe another circumstantial payoff.

Then, last month, word of the photos splatters urgently onto the Internet, which forces the researchers to respond. The blogosphere lights up with accusations and invective, character attacks and omniscient screeds from The Excluded, who have no more information than I do. After fielding late-night phone calls from angry strangers demanding to see the photos, Bragalia, who has never possessed them, delivers his own retort. The subsequent comment threads merely validate the slide owner’s aversion to going public. Things like “The slides either don’t exist or they’re fake and someone is the victim of a scam,” “Pure, unassailable Bullshit,” “put up or shut up,” and “YOU SUCK!!!!!!!!!!”

Yeah, put me in, coach …

“How people can comment on evidence that hasn’t been presented yet is beyond me. The drama and the politics over this thing have overwhelmed the investigation,” says Bragalia, who drew fire from the “believer” side for proving, last year, to his satisfaction, the famous 1964 Socorro UFO incident was a student hoax. “We’ve found out a lot — the back story, the chain of custody, the provenance of the film has been well established. But why present the evidence prematurely? An attorney representing clients wouldn’t ask a judge to make an early determination until he’d completed his own investigation.”

Bragalia says the investigation is continuing, but without the photo owner coming forward to explain, this one’s stillborn. But De Void gets it. Fifty years ago, confronted with the obligations of justice and history, Abraham Zapruder made the only choice he could. In a real sense, his life was no longer his own. At least his troubles were worth a measure of financial compensation.

But imagine if you stumbled across something far murkier, something potentially Earth-rocking but also, perhaps, no more substantial than a Whoopee cushion. You have no agenda because you honestly don’t know what you’re dealing with. But it defies conventional wisdom. Stepping up will provoke swift and unpredictable emotional reaction, some of it inevitably unstable. Whatever money you could get for it — if you wanted to play that angle — would never be enough to buy back the blessed obscurity you forfeited on the gamble that your exhibit might write, or re-write, history.

21 comments on “The chainsaw blues”

Let me start off by saying I wish your paper hadn’t gone to requiring a subscription to see more than five articles. I know, they have to make money. On the other hand, I can’t afford to subscribe to everything I read on the internet. I have missed reading your articles, Billy (I think I have actually missed a lot of them lately).

I do feel comfortable in asking the following question (since I won’t be able to get back in to see who said nasty things to me). If Billy, who works this stuff for a living, doesn’t have any more information about this investigation than what he has printed, then, PurrlGurrl , how do you already know so much more about the players than he does? Are you with the government? Frankly, if you really don’t have any inside information, I find your constant put-down of these articles and the people they are about, your fake sophisticated enwei, as it were, to be quite tedious. Why not get a hobby you are interested in?

> But imagine if you stumbled across something far murkier, something potentially Earth-rocking

Naturally, you would reach out to a group whose members include known fabulists. You would never contact a respected science writer or scientist in hopes their credibility would protect you from scorn.

Maybe the Aliens have a high tech ability to blur photos. Maybe Sasquatch has a photo blurring transmitter surgically implanted by the aliens. What other reason could there be for all the photos being worthless? The transmitter also have the magical ability to transform all the UFO abductees into blithering, psychotic idiots.

PurrlGurrl wrote, “One would think that by now Roswellites would have realized that Roswell is just a distraction covering a U.S. military or secret testing accident.”

I would agree that, absent verifiable evidence determining otherwise, the theory to beat is U.S. military activity. Belief systems involving alien craft at Roswell are based much more on media influence, aka personal conditioning, than any other factor, in my opinion.

I think Mr. Cox reasonably accurately described the events of the past couple weeks. The events leading up to the series of blog posts were a bit more complicated than fully represented, but the gist of it is correct.

Not so sure the same could be said, though, for the descriptions of the status of the owner of the slides and the intentions of all the players. I think a whole lot more info would have to come to light before we could conclusively know why some of these people did things exactly the way they did.

Hmmmmm? Another piece of evidence unseen by the public, submitted without scientific verification, of unknown origin, made public through a string of anonymous sources who want to remain hidden because they fear for their lives. For some reason I feel like we have been down this road before.

True, true Billy. But the LLc could be promoted as being created just to protect the owner from the backlash, especially if the LLc never makes a dime off the slides. Give em to the AP and to any other media outlet for free. Have the slides tested to prove if they came from 1947 stock and then just let the pieces fall where they’re at. You know ABC News did a pretty damn good piece on all the UFO stuff with Peter Jennings. Whoever produced that my still be with the network or moved on to another network. If they were approached by the LLc and didn’t want ANY money, you might get something rolling.

The trigger happy bloke who leaked the slides is a PR pro who seems to have a vested interest (financial?) in continuing to flog all things Roswell. They’re just another Maguffin in a story that’s grown old and stale, especially since no one will be able to prove whether or not they were staged even if their vintage is correct and their provenance vetted.

One can only hope that Roswell’s days as a cash cow are winding down and the next book (even if it covers the slides) tanks. For far too long this fairy tale has crowded out and diverted attention from far more interesting as well as promising cases. But, wait a minute. Doesn’t that fit one definition of disinformation?

Wow. Someone should form an LLc in a state where you don’t have to reveal the names of those in the LLc and establish ownership. That way whoever found them could share them for history’s sake and not divulge who they are. If they’re in it for the money they’re going to catch hell. If not, if it’s for the Truth but they want to protect their identity, maybe it’ll fly. The LLc would need a spokesmen. That person would be very busy and catch hell.